Turkish Airlines

Pain points

To create a responsive website for Turkish Airlines based on my own user research with a feature of checking pet suitable flights.

The challenge

The process was to take full ownership of the various roles involved in designing a product, define who the end-user is and its goals, then plan how the product would function via the user flows as well as conducting usability studies, after that wireframing and mock up phases and iterating on designs.

The process

( I conducted this research in English and Russian languages but I will only upload my findings in English )

The goal

At the time of working on this case study, I was in Moscow, a city that has lots of foreigners and locals that decided to leave the country and take their pets with them. The situation is hard in general and the fact that there are not many airlines that can leave Russia we were basically left with Turkish Airlines. I myself went through this process and it took me a long time as well as a lot of frustration, I saw fellow expats struggle too and that made me want to improve the company's User Experience design. The main goal was to focus on the users, make it much simpler for them to rest their hearts, and be sure their beloved pets can go to the next destination with them.

Why Turkish Airlines?

A website that people can use to book flights for themselves with pets without contacting the airlines.

The main pain point can be found in the summary above but I also found some other flaws.

People do not know what flights they can book so the pets can be on the same flight to find this information out they need to call the hotline, then book a ticket and then call again to confirm the pet.

Screenshots taken on a few different Facebook groups.

User Research: summary

I conducted user and market research to understand the users I'm designing for and their needs. A primary user group identified through research was working adults that have animals that they cannot leave behind, mostly aged from 23 to 70 years old. From the secondary research I conducted I could see that people think highly of Turkish Airlines.

But there was also a lot of misunderstanding as well as frustration. People didn't really know how to get flights for their pets and some people spent hours in the office and some spent hours trying to get through the hotline.

This research basically proved comments and messages from Facebook and will be discussed in the pain points section below.

I also conducted a Guerilla research at the airport when traveling with my dog. I asked a stranger to go through the original website and see if she will be able to understand how to travel with the dog with Turkish Airlines.

Time

Working adults do not want to spend their free time to wait in queues or on the phone just to get their animals on the flight.

Screens

Some screens could have been changed. Navigation bar and everything else should be easy understood by any user.

Visual design

In some places the website seems to be hard to understand, there are some phrases people do not understand. Red color buttons appear to be warning for some users.

Mapping George's user journey revealed how helpful it would be for users to be able to reserve a spot for the pet online.

I created a user persona to put a face on Turkish Airlines' target user and visualize various aspects of their behavior and motivations. This persona was roughly based on the users interviewed during the usability testing.

The goal was to compare the user experience of some other airlines' websites. To learn what features work best for travelers with pets.

Feedback from this audit
As Turkish Airlines is known as a great company to trust your pets to and it is not considered to be expensive, with an updated section on the website, company will have more clients because it will be easy for them to control all the information online.

Some opportunities for this website redo include:
● Show what flights have space for pets
● Reserve space for pets in cabin or in hold
● Add a programs for frequent flying pets
● Rethink the cost policy as other companies seem to charge much less ( $200 at Etihad)
● Have travel success stories on the website for users to be able to trust the airline company

For this case study I did not create any low-fidelity wireframes because my main goal was to complete this research fast and efficiently not making many changes to the design of the website, simply by adding a couple of features.

Using the completed set of digital wireframes, I created a high-fidelity prototype.
The primary user flow I connected was booking a flight for a person and its pet , so the prototype could be used in a usability study.

Link here

To test the user experience of the actual design and this redesign, I conducted three rounds of usability studies with a few people that own pets and consider traveling with them. I asked them to perform a few predefined tasks on the current website, then on a high-fidelity prototype I created and then again after changing some flaws.

Findings from the first study helped us understand the main problems of the website when it comes to traveling with pets. Research also showed that in most cases people who travel with pets travel for a longer period of time which means baggage is very important for them when it comes to choosing an airline.
The second usability study results were much better and users felt much more confident when learning about Pet Travel.

Red is the information about the current website. Green is about the redesign.

Find the information about how to book a pet ticket
Find the information about what you need to prepare for the flight
Find out how much it is to travel with a 15 kg dog
Check how many kg you are allowed to take with
From the home screen, find flights that are available for pet travel, add a 15 kg dog to your flight

Choosing a flight

The latest version of this prototype can be found here.

Additional Services

Home screen

This redesign shows that animal owners feel much more comfortable when it comes to booking a flight. A lot of animals might be left behind and the problem of stray dogs is a big problem in a lot of countries so if there is a detailed and at the same time easy way of explaining what and how to do, people and animals will be happier.
One quote from usability study participants:
" I love it how there is this reassurance that things will be alright with your pet on basically each page, traveling with a dog for the time is very stressful so it is really what I need!"

This project was really exciting. After struggling as a user myself, I had no other idea but to improve the whole experience. During usability studies I have learnt a lot from my participants, they gave me a lot of feedback about how they see the current website and what other things I needed to change in my own version of it. I also learnt a lot about different airline companies as well as stories of people traveling with pets. It was very fascinating!

In this case study only one little part was redesigned, so the next step could be redesigning some other pages to make the experience of choosing Turkish Airlines much better.

Thank you for your time reviewing my work on the redesign of Turkish Airlines pet traveling version! If you'd like to see more or get in touch, my contact information is provided below.

Email: alexandraousasha@gmail.com
Website: https://shuttersmile.me/ux-home

Work on other features in this mobile app.

There are some ideas for the website redesign with my thinking process.

Problem statement: George is a busy manager who needs a new, faster way of booking flights for himself and his pet because he doesn't have enough time to spend hours on the phone or standing in the lines.

User journey map

Persona of Turkish Airlines user

Competitive audit

High-fidelity prototype

Usability study: findings

What I learned:

Impact

Next steps

Thank you!

Mockups

Round 1 findings ( original website)

Users get lost in the information found on the website, they see a lot of text and it is very hard to read.